


graveless

by chartreuser



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Ovi is an immortal dude doing his best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 20:36:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13419150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chartreuser/pseuds/chartreuser
Summary: Sasha can't stay thirty-two forever; at least to other people.





	graveless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Catznetsov](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/gifts).



> thank you so much to angularmomentum for holding my hand as always, and providing me with heaps and heaps of inspiration. also a big thank you to jarka for hosting this exchange!
> 
> and to dear constantine, 
> 
> i love your fics so much, and i hope that i've done your prompt justice. so many of your fics have this 'magically realistic' element to them that sucks me in and makes me never want to leave the world you've created, and that's such an amazing skill that i hope to successfully emulate one day. you said you liked a bit of sadness, so i went ahead with that. i hope you like this!

Everything Sasha had was buried in Moscow. Whatever he had left, he packed in a little coffin: books, broken sunglasses, necklaces tangled in one another. He’d walked into an abandoned cemetery to bury it himself, beside his brother’s grave. He bought the shovel two towns over, to cover everything in dirt. He took a little bit back with him in a necklace of his own. Sometimes the grime leaked through the cracks in the pendant, but nobody ever else opened it. 

“Now there’s dirt all over my sheets,” Nicke says. “It’s like having your dogs in my house.”

Sasha grunts, holding up his shattered, ancient trash. “They’re a part of me.”

“Okay,” Nicke starts, and extends his hand, for Sasha to leave the rusted thing in his palm. “What do you want me to do with this?”

Sasha climbs out of the bed. “Anything,” he says, and goes to wash his hands. “Throw it away, if you care.”

“Are you sure?” Nicke stands in the doorway of the bathroom, his hand dirtied, staring off-kilter to the right of Sasha like he’s missing something.

“Why not,” asks Sasha. “It’s old, and it’s been a while.” He looks at Nicke, who straightens at that, the odd seriousness in his tone. Surely he must know, Sasha thinks, but how does anybody? Sasha himself hadn’t even found out. It was just a little shock that he learned how to weather, gradually, little confused tiny steps he took with nobody else around. It was a hard lesson to learn, but he had a lot of time to learn it, with nobody to point his mistakes out.

There’s a minute where Nicke’s thinking, a look that Sasha’s seen in a thousand people’s eyes. And then, when he’s determined on an answer: “How long have you had it?” 

“Quite some time,” Sasha says, “Three hundred years.”

Nicke nearly drops Sasha’s medieval trash. “Oh.”

“You don’t seem surprised,” Sasha points out, turning the tap off, turning to dry his hands on Nicke’s stupid white towels. 

“I am,” says Nicke. “Maybe I’m just in shock.” 

“You look like you believe me,” says Sasha.

“Maybe I don’t,” Nicke says, scrunching his pale eyebrows at the floor, young in his oversized shirt, his tight boxers. “Maybe…”

“Don’t take too long to be shocked about it,” Sasha offers. “I need to tell you something.”

 

::

 

Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, like he’s pretending they haven’t been watching each other for the past three hours, Nicke says, “So you’re old.”

“I am old,” Sasha confirms. “Maybe little older than you thought I was.”

Nicke huffs. “A _little_ —”

“A little more than little,” Sasha concedes. “Maybe I’m three hundred years old. Why does it matter?”

“I would’ve liked to know,” Nicke tells him, and Sasha can tell that he’s trying to be gentle now, standing rooted in his position, his arms folded tenderly. “You didn’t think I’d believe you?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sasha says. “You will know in a decade.”

“A decade is how long we’ve known each other,” Nicke says. “But it makes sense, now, why you keep dyeing your hair grey.”

Sasha throws an egg at him, and misses. “How you know?”

“You live here,” Nicke says, resting his head against the frame. 

“I lived in many places.” 

“And now you live here,” Nicke says, stepping onto the broken egg, and cursing. “For what it’s worth, I like the grey.”

“Liked it, the first few lives or so,” Sasha tells him. “So I did it sooner and sooner.” 

“Ah,” Nicke says, but doesn’t offer anything else. 

They stay there for a couple more minutes; Nicke cleaning Sasha’s mess, Sasha shoving the eggs around. In here, Sasha’s struck by how commonplace the sentiment is, the readiness of his body to sink into the rhythm that will outlast its people every single time. Watching Nicke that way, wiping the yolk away on his hands and knees. He misses it. Sasha misses him already, even if Nicke’s right in front of him.

“So what did you have to tell me?” Nicke asks, straightening, shoulder to shoulder with him at the sink.

Sasha turns to him and smiles, kissing him at the scar on his lip. “I didn’t expect you to ask so soon.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Maybe you didn’t believe me.” 

Nicke blinks slowly, still contemplating. Maybe he still doesn’t. It’s hard to tell. “You look it.”

“I look old?” 

“Yes,” Nicke says. “You look like you don’t belong here with us.”

Sasha laughs. “I don’t,” he says. “Who really does?” He grabs Nicke’s hand and presses a kiss to his knuckles, then flips Nicke’s hand over, and shows him his own. “Time is cruel to me, but you’ll never see it.” 

“I was wondering about that,” Nicke tangles their fingers together. “Why I can never tell how old you act.” 

“Apparently, I act like three hundred years old man.”

“Yes,” Nicke relents. “Apparently, so. Tell me.” 

Sasha releases his hand. “I have to leave.” 

“Okay,” Nicke says. “What do you mean by ‘leave’?”

“Disappear,” Sasha says. “Run away, like vampire.” 

“For how long?”

“What you think?” Sasha asks.

“Forever?”

“I’d hope not,” Sasha tells him, watching the creases of his frown. “I’d hope not forever.”

 

::

 

Eccentricity has always been what Sasha had used to get by. Nobody questions what he’s lived through, and nobody questions the haggard, broken down nose he’s sustained from war. Nobody asks a reckless hockey player historical questions. Nobody asks him what it’s like to stave off dying—Sasha does as he likes, but he never does it too well.

He was dragged into hockey, but nobody could claim that he hadn’t wanted to stay, where things never mattered on a bigger scale, like his suspicious documents or blatantly false identification. Sasha had hockey but a piece of the world had him too, this brilliant impulse that had gone on for so long that he’s lost sight of it already. 

“Tell me why you need to leave,” says Nicke the next morning, his voice catching in his throat. They have a game in four days; Nicke needs to get himself together, Nicke needs to answer to the children in the group chat. Nicke needs to start worrying about hockey again.

“You want me to have stay here like this?” Sasha asks. “Greying like a lie? They know I’m not young anymore, or I’m not supposed to be.”

“But now?” Nicke asks, who hurts to look at, who compressed all his pain for this moment, right here, having slept fitfully the night before. Sasha had let him stare until he fell asleep, finally, and left to walk through the house in a nostalgic haze. He’s older than the house they stand in, but Sasha still looks younger than Nicke, even with his hair dyed, his beard filled out. 

Sasha wants to ease his anger, but he’s not sure if he can. “I’m not breaking up with you.”

“You’re just breaking up with your whole life, then.”

Sasha basks in it, his distress, briefly selfish, before he pushes it down. “I’m not going anywhere,” he explains. “I wish I could. I’m stuck.” 

Nicke shifts closer. “You should have told me sooner.”

“I know.” Sasha tucks some of his hair behind his ear, feeling his soft breath by the skin of his hand. “If I was your age, I would’ve loved you.” 

“You don’t love me now?” Nicke asks, and oh, he’s hurting more, but Sasha has lived for so long and never grasped the art of perfect timing, or maybe he’s restricted because of that, of never really seeing time as what it was meant to be anymore.

“Not in the way you want,” Sasha tells him. “But I love you.”

“And you wait until now to tell me,” Nicke says, and it’s unclear if he’s going to cry, his eyes scrunched close, his jaw clenched. Sasha would accept the fist Nicke wants to swing at him right now. “What kind of—”

“—I’ve loved a lot of people.” 

“Doesn’t mean that’s not how I want you to love me,” Nicke clarifies. “Do you forget?”

“The people I loved?” Sasha clarifies.

“Yes.” 

Sasha blinks at him. He’s not certain if this warrants the truth or not, but it’s Nicke, and Nicke wouldn’t have wanted him to lie, even if it was a soft one. “Sometimes.”

“You’re not supposed to remember that many people, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha says. “Nobody ever told me. Sometimes you just go through life hoping to collect love, you know? Like I did. But I don’t know if there is anyone else. One day I wake up, and this happens. I stop dying.”

“Wow,” Nicke whispers, and Sasha turns back to him to see his eyes open, overflowing with pity—the righteous kind—the one where you were happy to see the people hurting you suffer, in a fit of indignity. “Children?”

“None.” 

“Must be a lonely way to live.”

“It is,” Sasha admits. “Like children’s game, you know? You pick up stones by the beach, but your mother will never let you bring them all home.”

“Which child goes to the beach every single day?” Nicke asks, shuffling to be closer to him, his fingers digging into the meat of Sasha’s skin. They won’t leave marks, no matter how hard he presses. Sasha knows that, even with none of the attention he pays the world, too busy hiding from it.

“Unfortunate one, maybe,” says Sasha.

 

 ::

 

“You’re really doing this,” says Nicke. 

Sasha hadn’t heard him come in through the front door. “Yes,” Sasha says. He feels Nicke’s hand on him, on his back, circling his waist, resting at the front. “I would stay longer, if you asked me to.”

“You don’t want to, though,” Nicke says. 

Sasha drops the roll of tape onto the floor, where it lands with a subdued thud. He’s glad he can’t see Nicke’s expression, where it’s hidden behind his shoulder blades. He wants to pretend, for at least a moment, that he wouldn’t be there to watch the world at this agonisingly slow pace. Last night he had walked from Nicke’s house back to his own step by step, crossing the paved roads. His feet hadn’t hurt like they did back then. It took hours. Years. It’s not as if he could tell anymore; Sasha wishes it took longer.

“Why now?” Nicke asks. He sounds like he’s crying, but Sasha isn’t sure. He doesn’t want to check, out of his own cowardliness, of exhaustion, of having to do this again.

“Can I really be thirty-two forever?” Sasha asks, as lightly as he can. “I think anything further than this is pushing it, no?”

“No one has found out,” says Nicke. 

The house is silent except for the patter of the dogs. Sasha will bring them with him, for as long as he can have them. They’re barking at each other; maybe they’re wondering what Sasha is doing, packing their whole lives away.

“In hockey?” Sasha asks. “You want me to be ageless?”

“Okay,” says Nicke.

“Okay?” asks Sasha. 

“No,” Nicke admits. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” 

It is a little bit of a surprise, no matter how many times he's done it, to leave. The little hockey trophies he amassed. He wonders if he should leave this house to Nicke, to keep until Sasha can come back—and briefly he imagines that, some world where they could have held together and brokered for something to work for them. This whole decade of unmarriage. They'd stayed by each other this entire time.

He’d build them a future. He would have adapted. Maybe they could have even lived in the past, in the village that Sasha grew up in; maybe Nicke would have adapted to farms. He would have liked the air, maybe, the blue sky, the stone paths, the frail houses. The world was smaller. He used to live every day without interruption.

“I wanted to grow old with you,” says Nicke, so honest that it hurt to hear. “I keep searching for reasons why you’d want to leave.”

“A person like me…” 

“Couldn’t have stayed in sport,” Nicke finishes for him. “I know. I know this.” 

“Thank you,” says Sasha. “Maybe we could grow old together. One day.” 

“One day,” Nicke echoes. “And then you’d watch me get wrinkles, while you stayed stagnant at the height of your youth?”

“Probably,” Sasha apologises. “People tend to die on me.”

For a moment he thinks about Nicke pleading as he shakes: _we will find a way to fix it_ , he’d say, and Sasha will have to deny him that, even until now, even if they’re still here, even if they’re both still alive for this miraculously short period of time. He had begged for so long, but nothing ever came out of it other than a state of forced seclusion. It wasn’t as if he wanted to stay solitary. He keeps dreaming, after centuries… the dream of someone who had something to lose. 

“Can this be fixed?” Nicke asks, voice unsteady.

Sasha says, “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll find you, then.” 

“Please,” Sasha says, glad to keep his face away from him, even if they’ve cried in front of each other frequently enough. Sasha just wants to get a head start on losing him, before the wound blisters.

 

::

 

In his pocket is his passport, air ticket, old keys, and a slip of paper with the address of his new house in Ushuaia. Nicke is the one sending him to the airport with a stack of letters stowed somewhere safe, presumably, for the lies Sasha has newly made up about leaving. He supposes that there’s a certain kind of hilarity there, of being able to tell nobody the truth as it is. He’ll never know the truth himself. He’ll never know what he’s still doing, alive, barely alive, long past death.

Nicke is the one to carry his luggage to the check-in counters, where they say nothing to each other. They do nothing but share a silence as they sit down, while time passes, like on a mundane plane ride for a road trip, like on a charter bus, like simply simulated life. The clock in front of him ticks by. Sasha learns how to count seconds again, before he digs deep into his pocket for the note, which he presses into Nicke’s hand. There’s no time left, and Sasha’s squandered it all, like always, but ending things too perfectly would really mean just that: an ending, and nothing else. 

“Come visit,” Sasha forces out of his throat, while the overhead announcement starts blaring again, startling the years off Sasha, like he’s transported back to a war that nobody really remembers anymore. Abruptly the world happens too quickly around him, other passengers blurring in their tracks. He feels his heartbeat start and stutter again. _Please come visit_ , Sasha thinks, brimming with hope like he had three hundred years ago, “Okay?” And then a touch desperately, like a dying man: “Please come and see me, if only once?”

“I will,” Nicke promises. “You know I will,” he says, and he looks like he wants to kiss him, like he had in the past scant decade, where Sasha held his hand through games so much less significant in history, where Nicke would look back when he would be older, but never as old as Sasha. 

Sasha squeezes his hand, wondering at the next time he’ll see him, when his wrinkles grow deeper into his skin and his blondeness fades to white, at the steadiness of his gaze. There is nothing else to do in this brief, sped-up time, all there is left is for Sasha to turn away, to leave: "Bye, Nicky."

"Bye," says Nicklas. "I'll see you."

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if anybody is meant to stay in my life permanently; I'm not really a person people seek out on their own time. I think I'm still trying to come to terms with that; that loneliness might just be a symptom of being here. Not all of us are going to have beautiful lives shaped like well-crafted short stories, and some of us will only receive love that expires, and the rest of us will come by unconditional love less frequently, sometimes never. 
> 
> Find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/chartreusers).


End file.
